YIVO Launches The Online Guide to the YIVO Archives

(NEW YORK, January 16, 2013) – The YIVO Institute is delighted to announce the launching of its new website, the Online Guide to the YIVO Archives at yivoarchives.org.

Created by the YIVO project team with the generous support of the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, the new site expands and upgrades the original Guide to the YIVO Archives, published in 1998. The new Online Guide builds on what was available in the printed Guide by offering information on several hundred additional YIVO collections, as well as detailed finding aids to selected collections.

The new website provides information and facilitates access to YIVO’s vast archive of about 23,000,000 documents, manuscripts, photographs, films, sound recordings, and art works and artifacts. The YIVO Archives holds materials about Jewish life around the world, with special focus on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Yiddish language, literature and culture, the Holocaust and its aftermath and Jewish life in the United States with emphasis on the period of migration. The new Online Guide has been conceived as a living catalog, which YIVO will continue to update with newly cataloged and newly acquired collections, as well as enhanced descriptions of collections and comprehensive finding aids, as they are produced and become available.

Thanks to a second generous gift from the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, awarded in September 2012, the YIVO Archives is currently carrying out Phase II of the Online Guide to the YIVO Archives Project, adding new collections and databases to the website. Phase II is scheduled for completion at the end of 2013. As part of its long term vision for the website, YIVO plans to progressively expand the Online Guide to include a portal to digitized YIVO photographs, documents, films, art works and sound recordings.

For press inquiries, contact:

Fruma Mohrer
Senior Archivist
(212) 294-6143